The version of youtube-dl in the Ubuntu repos is very outdated

[aaronfranke]

$ sudo apt install youtube-dl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
youtube-dl is already the newest version (2016.02.22-1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit

[dstftw]

Ask Ubuntu maintainers to update it.

[aaronfranke]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/youtube-dl/+bug/1704368

[siddht4]

I am soon going to add the built directly to ppa i.e ppa:dhar-75-ap/youtube-dl. If you want to try it before hand feel free to go to https://github.com/siddht4/youtube_dl_deb or directly download via https://siddht4.github.io/youtube_dl_deb/youtube-dl_2017.07.15_all.deb

[aaronfranke]

Ubuntu bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/youtube-dl/+bug/1529647

[Asuanin]

package in Ubuntu repo is again very outdated
Ubuntu repo: 2018.03.14 (bionic)
(Web Upd8: 2018.04.03 (not bionic))
Latest release: 2019.01.30.1

Have you been thinking over your own PPA repository with unstable/latest releases?
With Jenkins for make builds (not only DEB) and Launchpad is very simply.

And witch release is current stable?

[dstftw]

Again: address Ubuntu package questions to Ubuntu maintainers.
We won't maintain distro specific repo packages.
There is no notion of stable release, latest = stable.